Schermerhorn

Sometime around 1200 years ago in the northern part of Holland, prospectors followed a small river inland to a vast area of peat for digging. Being in the peat lands of the Netherlands, the river often flooded in storms, forming a wide shallow like from time to time. This earned it the name "Skir mere" which means "bright lake." This name was eventually shortened to "Schermer," which also became the name of the area around the the river's flood basin.

By the year 1250, the removal of peat and the repeated river flooding connected the Schermer river to the Zuiderzee, thus allowing for trade all the way to the North Sea. The people there settled a small village where the Schermer met another river, and they called it Schermerhorn.

Even today, the village of Schermerhorn is home to less than 900 people. Yet those bearing Schermerhorn as a surname have spread across the Netherlands and around the world. There were Schermerhorns among the original Dutch settlers of New Amsterdam, and they rose to be among the earliest aristocrats of the New World. For generations the Schermerhorn name was passed down through the wealthy Dutch of New York and Brooklyn.

It was a Schermerhorn who, married into the Astor family, created the Astor hotel to rival a competing family member's Waldorf Hotel. These hotels were later merged into the famous Waldorf-Astoria. (This same Schermerhorn, Caroline Webster Schermerhorn Astor, had a 39-foot-tall cenotaph erected for her grave at Trinity Church, not far from where I live now.)

The Schermerhorn farm, across the river in Brooklyn, had been divided and subdivided as the small village of Brooklyn grew into the second-largest city in the US. By the time of Caroline's reign over New York society, all that remained was a street running through Brooklyn (later called Brooklyn Heights): Schermerhorn Street.

Lynn and I have found an apartment, we're moving to Schermerhorn Street.

House Hunting in the Middle

I'm a bit frustrated. The building I love has become so incredibly annoying that I can hardly wait to leave it. The adjacent building has added 9 floors to itself, completely blocking all of our windows. We have to draw the shades so as not to draw the attention of the workers 8 feet outside the windows. But the shades don't block the noise. 7am sharp, every morning.

I've always said that the building is wonderful, it's just everything around it that's bad.

So, we've made the decision to move (possibly to Brooklyn). Our lease is up April 1st, and that's no joke, so the time to be looking elsewhere is now. Ideally, we'd want to overlap a little with our current lease to make the transition easier.

We've toyed with the idea of buying an apartment, especially with the market coming down so quickly. But the market isn't quite there yet, and we don't want to commit ourselves to a mortgage when our own industries aren't the most stable. And the process is so long. We've spent more than a month looking at properties on weekends, just to see what's available. And many of those properties will still be there if we start looking again later. It takes ages to negotiate a price, go through the process, and close. Far too long for our needs right now.

Meanwhile, with the rental market in NYC, the attitude is "now or never." If you look at an apartment, find that you like it, and fail to sign the lease that day, it's probably gone tomorrow. This too is abetting a little with demand falling off in this economy, but the prevailing attitude is still there. We've got an appointment for Saturday in Brooklyn. If we see something we like, we have to make the decision to live there immediately. There's no time to consider other neighborhoods, or sleep on it. Yes or no. Now or never.

I want the middle road. I want to be able to compare and consider apartments, to take the time to feel out the neighborhood, and what it would be like to live in a certain place. I want to learn about the building--where is the laundry? The recycling? But I also want the speed and ease of finding a place soon, and not spending weeks to months negotiating and signing a lease.

Tomorrow I may have a new address.

Learning Relativity in the Subway

On the subway home from yesterday, there was a boy and his parents. I'm not a very good judge of age, but I'd put him around 2 years old; he was talking, but not the most steady on his feet. Generally, my reaction to toddlers on the subway quickly falls into one of two possibilities: "aww, cute" or more frequently "please stop screaming."

This child was well-behaved enough, and I saw a very interesting thing happen. He was sitting on his mother's lap, on the right-hand side of the train. Thus, to his right was the direction of travel. His father, sitting across from him, was asking if he knew how many stops they had before they got off the train. The child, thinking hard, decided instead to point out that everything outside the train windows was moving "that way," to his left.

The father said, no, the train was moving "that way," pointing to the child's right and the direction of travel. Having none of it, the boy insisted, no, that way--left and against the direction of travel. They went on like this for a while, before the father gave up, and the mother distracted the boy with a small box of goldfish.

Mmmm, goldfish.

I found it strangely fascinating, watching the two argue about what exactly was moving, and in which direction. The boy, knowing full well that he was sitting down, and clearly watching the stations and lights whiz by from right to left, correctly stated his observations from the center of his at-rest coordinate system. The father, aware of his position in the larger coordinate system consisting of the whole city, correctly stated his observations from a moving point within that larger system. Both were right, but both continued to try and convince the other to change coordinate systems.

The source of their confusion is that the boy is still thinking concretely, unable to change his frame of reference to the world outside the train. Adults, though able to think abstractly and change their frame of reference, often refuse to change once they've chosen one. Most adults would never say, "get on the 1 train, and wait for the third stop to arrive." But both father and child sat there, staring at each other across the subway car, teetering on the edge of one of the first principles of Relativity.

Sometimes we need to remember, when talking to each other, to define our frame of reference.